Final Target

CHAPTER 51

T he ranch-style house on Grizzly Peak Road, high in the Berkeley Hills, was surrounded by a garden so geometrically perfect as to be unnerving. The heavy, gray-haired man who met Gage at the door wasn’t. Seventy-three-year-old retired professor Ben Blanchard, dressed in blue baggy-kneed sweatpants, a coffee-stained white top, and running shoes that had never run, led Gage through a museumlike living room, out a sliding glass door, and through a covered patio to his workshop. A desk and two chairs were jammed into the far corner, heated and partially illuminated by a lone radiant heater.

“My wife calls this The Fort,” Blanchard said, smiling. “She’s not far wrong. The most attractive aspect of academic life is one they don’t list on the employment announcement, an everlasting childhood.”

Blanchard laughed, as he undoubtedly had the four or five thousand previous times he’d used the line. His timing, as he well recognized, was perfect, and Gage laughed on cue.

Gage glanced around The Fort as Blanchard led him to his desk. Apparently unfinished projects seemed to immeasurably outnumber the apparently finished. One on the workbench seemed to be close to completion.

“What are you working on?” Gage asked.

Blanchard cast Gage a teasing look. “I don’t know you well enough.”

“For what?”

“It’s top secret.”

“From whom?”

“My wife.”

Blanchard’s conspiratorial pause invited the obvious question.

“And it is…?”

“A real cool garage door opener. Very sophisticated. It practically knows my name.”

“Unless it also opens a missile silo, I’m not sure it qualifies as top secret.”

“It does too.” Blanchard grinned. “My wife thinks I’m fixing the microwave.”

Blanchard knocked papers off a metal folding chair. “Have a seat. You want a beer?”

“Sure.”

Blanchard reached into a half-height refrigerator and pulled out two Budweisers. “I know this is Berkeley so I’m supposed to drink a microbrew, but it’s my fort and I’ll drink what I want.” He handed one bottle to Gage, then twisted the cap off his own. “Faith says you have something top secret, too.”

Gage opened his briefcase and displayed the DVDs and a black plastic box Milsberg had delivered. “I don’t want to put you in a difficult position, but these contain the trade secrets of a defense contractor in Silicon Valley. SatTek.”

“SatTek? Very interesting.” Blanchard pointed at the box. “What’s in there?”

“A video detector for a Hellfire missile.”

A look of delight followed Blanchard’s raised eyebrows. “Even more interesting, but I’m not worried. The Fort is like international waters, and its citizens, of which you are now one, are immune from prosecution.”

Gage laid the items on Blanchard’s desk, then outlined the case that was being framed around Burch and Matson’s efforts to appraise the assets of SatTek.

“I need to understand what their intellectual property is worth, but it may be a little complicated to figure out. Not only do they produce offensive devices like video detectors, but they also manufacture defensive ones, like bi-static radar and acoustic amplifiers.”

“I know exactly what you’re talking about.” Blanchard tapped his forefinger on his desk. “If we’d had those devices along the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan, Osama bin Laden never would have escaped. You can pick up the sound of a sandal stepping into sand.” He shrugged. “Of course, there was no way the U.S. would’ve let Pakistan have anything this sophisticated. They’d use them against us someday.”

Blanchard stood up and began to pace.

“I can tell you this right off. The technology for these products is hugely expensive to develop. First, because it uses embedded software, burned into the hardware, that allows a device to respond on its own to stimuli in the environment. Very, very sophisticated. And second, because it has to interface with large, complicated systems, and device failures can reverberate throughout with catastrophic results. So there’s no room for error.”

Blanchard realized that he’d begun lecturing and sat down, substituting gesticulating for pacing.

“The applications range far beyond what SatTek was doing. From cell phones to nuclear power plants-”

“And Dr. Blanchard’s garage opening system?”

“Exactly. It may take a couple of days but I can help you out. I suspect that some of the design work was at least partially done by former students of mine. It’s not rocket science.” Blanchard smiled. “Well, actually, it is. In any case, it’ll be fun, and an excellent excuse to avoid the microwave.”

Blanchard led Gage back through the house and down the garden walkway to his car.

“Scary, isn’t it,” Blanchard said.

“What? SatTek?”

“No, the garden. Versailles is the Australian Outback compared to this place. Trust me, I’ve seen both. My wife trims the hedges with a nail clipper.” Blanchard fingered a precisely angled leaf of a Fuji hedge. “At least it keeps her off my back, dear person that she is.”

Gage pointed back at The Fort. “You want to meet up back here after you’ve had a chance to look at everything?”

“No. At my old lab at Cal. The disadvantage of having emeritus after your name is that colleagues treat you like their senile grandfather. The advantage is that they still give you free rein of the place-as long as you don’t run with sharp objects.”

“How soon can you get to it?”

“I’ll start tonight after everyone has gone home.”